Fall cleaning

Justin and I cleaned out some of the more cobwebby parts of mystic yesterday. We wanted to install Python 2.4 with subversion, trac and apache 2. It took a fair bit of wrangling (i.e. building from source) to get everything working together after which Justin realised that we hadn't upgraded to Sarge (duh!). He rebuilt everything using the latest packages and it looks OK so far.

The transition from Apache 1.3 to 2.x was pretty smooth with the SSL stuff at the high end weighing in at about 20-30 minutes to figure out. Although the new sites-available/sites-enabled organization is nicely architected, it does make for some pretty painful contortions when performing wholesale changes on a group of virtual hosts. For example, we started off testing the new installation of Apache 2.x on port 81 (which required that we split out the vhost declarations into files of their own) and then proceeded to switch it to port 80 (which ended up requiring a quick cat/sed/re-direct combination). Without a good knowledge of shell scripts or some scripting language this would have been really painful.

The other rough item on our plate was permissions when using the Berkeley DB version of a subversion repository. My advice: don't go there. Just stick to FSFS and you should be OK. This being said, I had originally created the repository in FSFS but had subsequently dumped it and loaded it onto mystic. It seems that I did something wrong because it loaded in Berkeley DB mode. All that is fixed now and taken care of.

We also tossed in Apache subversion support for good measure so now we can setup anonymous browsing and reading of our SVN repositories.